Despite improvements in operative strategies for esophageal resection, anastomotic leaks, fistula, postoperative pulmonary complications, and chylothorax can occur. Our review seeks to identify potential risk factors, modalities for early diagnosis, and novel interventions that may ameliorate the potential adverse effects of these surgical complications following esophagectomy.

1 of 9) 1600202 wileyonlinelibrary.com solid venues for further developments, [9,10] including 1D SPP waveguides [11][12][13] and networks. [14][15][16] Owing to the fact that metals behave as perfectly electric conductors (PECs) at the far infrared, terahertz, and microwave frequencies, SPPs cannot be achieved in their original way. Alternatively, plasmonic metamaterials have been proposed to construct designer SPPs [2,17] (also termed as spoof SPPs [18] ) in the lower frequencies.Metamaterials and photonic crystals are macroscopic composites with controllable EM properties when the geometry and dimension of their composing particles are tuned. [19] Based on this inherent property of metamaterials or photonic crystals, the physical characteristics of designer SPPs can be tailored by tuning the geometrical parameters. [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] Besides the feature of slow waves, [27] the designer SPP structures can also achieve tight field confinements and remarkable field enhancements [20][21][22][23][25][26][27][28] in microwave and terahertz frequencies due to their properties of exponential decay of fields in all directions perpendicular to the patterned interface (i.e., the spatial waveguide modes do not exist around the designer SPP structures). This is quite different from the conventional slow-wave structures in the microwave frequencies. [29][30][31][32] In recent years, active metamaterials and metasurfaces have been developed toward the dynamic functionalities such as switching and modulating EM waves. [33] To attain the dynamic functionalities, a series of approaches have been proposed (e.g., the microelectromechanical technology, [34] phase-change media, [35,36] superconductors, [37] carrier injection or depletion in semiconductor substrates, [38] etc.), and many tunable metamaterial devices have been created accordingly. [35][36][37][38] Most recently, the concepts of coding and programmable metasurfaces have been proposed to control the scattering/radiation performance of spatial EM waves using the "0" and "1" meta-elements, which are the unit cells with opposite reflection-phase responses. [39] However, such coding and programmable metasurfaces were limited to control the behaviors of spatial waves, for example, to engineer the EM scattering and radiation of objects. [39] To the best knowledge of the authors, programmable SPPs and/or designer SPPs have not been reported.Here, we explore the concepts of coding and programmable designer SPPs and propose a new kind of planar SPP waveguide Manipulating the dispersion behaviors of electromagnetic (EM) waves at subwavelength scale provides many exciting physical phenomena and functionalities such as the phase matching, gain enhancement, super resolution, and slow light. Among the dispersion manipulations, surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are typical EM modes to control the wave flows owing to their sensitivity to the designed decorations on the metal-dielectric interfaces. However, either on metal-dielectric interfaces or decoration surfaces,...

Transmission line is a basic component in all passive devices, integrated circuits, and systems. Microstrip is the most popular transmission line in the microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies, and has been widely used in current electronic devices, circuits, and systems. One of the important issues to be solved in such applications is the relatively large transmission loss of microstrip. Here, we propose a method to reduce the loss of microwave transmission line based on the designable wavenumber of spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). Using this characteristic, we analyze and experimentally demonstrate the low-loss feature of the SPP transmission line through the perturbation method and S-parameter measurements, respectively. Both simulation and experimental results show that the SPP transmission line has much smaller transmission loss than traditional microstrip with the same size in the microwave frequencies. Hence, the spoof SPP transmission line may make a big step forward in the low-loss circuits and systems.

No abstract